Previews

Far Cry 2

Spiffy:

Iffy:

Classic open-world game problems.

With Ubisoft owning the rights to the "Far Cry" name and the Crytek engine used to create that game, the company's next steps should be obvious: churn out a Far Cry 2 with main character Jack Carver on a new tropical island. While it's true Ubisoft may have gone plundering a bit with sloppy Far Cry ports as of late, Far Cry 2 is looking like anything but a cheap cash-in. Our time with the game at the Leipzig Games Convention left us hopeful that Far Cry 2 is going to drop just as many jaws as the original.

Step Into the Heart of Darkness

The game starts off with you selecting a dossier from about a dozen choices. Each choice -- all male -- places you in the role of a mercenary, hired to drop an arms dealer selling to two savage rival warlords in Africa. Picking your dossier picks your character, aka "the person responsible for this mess."

From there, time skips back a bit. As one of these mercenaries, heading in to kill this arms dealer, you're very much Ubisoft's version of Yojimbo. You'll be heading into the area to kill the gun man, but you'll find yourself taking on all comers from both sides as they try to use your lethal skills without getting hurt for their trouble. "This mess" is what happens as that all unfolds.

The other characters will be deposited through the 50 square kilometer map, becoming your "buddies." Don't read too much into that, as these black-hearted killers are about as much your "buddies" as you're theirs. Like the two warlord's factions, you'll encounter these mercenaries throughout the massive open environment and have chances to grow your relationship -- or get the not-so-hapless non-player character killed. Once killed, they're really dead, for good, not "knocked out" or any other genre copouts.

In our demonstration, we were tasked with wiping out one of the force's many fuel depots. The game just left pre-production, but the African landscape is already breathtaking. The goal, in abandoning both the islands and the main character of the first Far Cry, was to capture the freedom of that title. So you have a massive chunk of exquisitely rendered Africa to play on, with its savannahs, jungles, and camps full of warriors.

Note that that's just warriors. Maybe warlords, or mercenaries, but no mutants. No super powers. Nothing but your wits and firepower versus theirs. We were promised there'd be absolutely no late-game mutant attacks.